At the risk of becoming hopelessly recursive, I’d like to direct you to the New York Review of Books, in particular, Zadie Smith’s review of E.M. Forster’s collected BBC book reviews. What caught my eye was Zadie Smith’s great opening paragraph: In the taxonomy of English writing, E.M. Forster is not an exotic creature. We [...]

The Spiderwick Chronicles is a superb fantasy movie that towers over its Narnian and Dark Materialed rivals despite, and possibly because of its non-epic, almost domestic scale. Although ostensibly for children, the filmmakers made a laudable decision to allow the threats to be very, very real, to be genuinely scary, and to avoid easy, mawkish [...]